Bush and Putin differs on role and achievements of Russians in World War II - Bush pays respect to Americans who freed Europe from Nazis
Balaji Reddy
May 8, 2005

Bush and Putin openly disagree on the role Russians played in World War II. Bush paid respect to all Americans who sacrificed their lives in freeing Europe and the World from the atrocities of Nazi Germany.

U.S. officials tried to persuade Putin to renounce the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in a goodwill gesture to the Baltic States. The Russian leader not only refused, but his government also reprised the old Soviet assertion that it never occupied Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia because they asked to join the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union declared the pact null and void 16 years ago.

"Our people not only defended their homeland, but also liberated 11 countries of Europe," Putin said Saturday at a ceremony to unveil a new World War II memorial in Moscow, according to the Interfax news service.

In describing Yalta as an example of American misjudgment, Bush revived a long-standing dispute over the extent of U.S. culpability in consigning Eastern Europe to Soviet domination. Stalin hosted Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945 to decide the fate of postwar Europe. When the war ended, the continent was left split in half.

Bush echoed ehat Ronald Reagan said in 1984. "Let me state emphatically, we reject any interpretation of the Yalta agreement that suggests American consent for the division of Europe into spheres of influence," Reagan said in August 1984. "On the contrary, we see that agreement as a pledge by the three great powers to restore full independence, and to allow free and democratic elections in all countries liberated from the Nazis after World War II."

Bush said "the legacy of Yalta was finally buried, once and for all," only when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Baltic States won their independence.

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